The Topic of Great Randomness

[illiriam]

Oh gosh Garrett, I am really sorry. I know how bad it is to lose a parent, so I don't think I'll use the cliches, since they don't really help. But just know that thoughts and prayers are with you and your family.
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I feel bad about not being on in the past two weeks. But its the Olympics, so I haven't done anything except school work and watching them. Yay figure skating and speed skating and skiing and jumping, and everything! Some days it has been the only thing to look forward to.
The (insert adjective here) snow totally messed up our schedules, so my nice spaced out workload suddenly all happened next week. A group presentation for sociology (where only 3 of the 6 members showed up to do work, and one of them didn't read the material), a sociology paper, a history research project/paper, a 400 level social theory exam worth 25% of my grade, and a take home/in-class exam for my 300 level soc of gender class (three page long single spaced essays are the take home part, and then two essays in class).
I keep getting tempted to call in sick with a coma. But then I realize that if I call that in they will know I am faking. So the details haven't been worked out, but that is Plan B.

And for all of you still in school, a lesson in why you need to read through the test before you start. It was a history test on Tuesday. I was doing well, since I was well prepared and it was American History, up to 1750. I was fifteen minutes from the class ending. I had written a long answer for the short answer essay, and was excited that there was only a short essay, and not a long one like I was expecting. (This should have tipped me off.) I went to check my answers and then flipped the test over. And saw the back of the page. With the long answer essay question options.
Thankfully, I am a quick thinker, and successfully answered the question. I only got 3 points off (despite the fact that my short answer was longer than my long answer) for missing a cause of colonialism in the Americas. But Tuesday I was in a panic thinking that that mistake made me fail. Which it didn't. I aced that thing.
So always look through your tests. And check your answers.

[crazy_bookworm]

Garrett: *hugs*

Alla: Congratulations!!!

The Mac is good, and you can get the software that transfers between Mac and PC's versions of Microsoft Office, but once you send a document to someone who has a PC and they make corrections to the document and send it back, you can't see all the Microsoft add-ins anymore, because they don't transfer back well. Either that or you can't see things when they send it to you from their PC. Can't remember... Lessons I have learned from sending physics lab reports back and forth. Thank God my dad bought me a flash drive for Christmas. Best present ever. Just have to make sure it's both PC and Mac capable.

OMG! K, Single Girls (Put a Ring on It) is on the radio and it makes me think of Glee, which I love! I bought the season pass off iTunes, and am all caught up on the first half of the season, and it's absolutely amazing. I love the story lines, and the acting, and the singing is AMAZING! I love how Mr. Schuester really cares about the kids and their well-being. Everyone deserves to have a teacher like that.

Our snow is finally melting, yay! You can feel the spring in the air. It went up to 8*C, which is 46*F, roughly. Sooo much better than -48*C. It doesn't look like we'll be hit with snow any time soon, either, yay!

[alla]

Regarding getting a mac with windows pre-installed, would you then be looking at just using Windows on it? Or would you be dual booting, or wanting to use Parallels? I currently run a MacBook Pro with dual boot windows and MacOS 10 (Leopard). I run Windows (Vista) because I need it for some programs, but my operating system of choice is MacOS. What are you looking for in a computer? My fiance has a Toshiba laptop, and they seem to be pretty sturdy. I wouldn't suggest another Dell. I've only known one person to not beat a Dell up, and even still she had problems with the keyboard (thankfully still under warranty). I've now had two Apple laptops (upgrade reasons, not breaking reasons, unless you count the battery dying as a problem, but it was after 4 years of use, thats not too bad). What do you use your laptop for?

but once you send a document to someone who has a PC and they make corrections to the document and send it back, you can't see all the Microsoft add-ins anymore, because they don't transfer back well. Either that or you can't see things when they send it to you from their PC. Can't remember... Lessons I have learned from sending physics lab reports back and forth. Thank God my dad bought me a flash drive for Christmas. Best present ever. Just have to make sure it's both PC and Mac capable.

I've never had that problem. As long as you're both using Microsoft Office, there shouldn't be a problem (unless its going between 2003/4 and 2007/8), but then everyone has problems.

[crazy_bookworm]

Alla: I don't use Microsoft Office, though. I use Pages/Numbers/Keynote, the Mac version of Word/Excel/Powerpoint. It's not bad, just have to remember to export to a Word document before you send things or else they won't open on a PC, but other than that, it's good.

[estar9821]

Oh gosh, crazybookworm! I commented a month ago about how much [I]I[I] love Glee, but few people really responded. Glad to have found another Gleek. My friend was obsessed with it from the first episode on, and then she finally convinced me to start watching about halfway through the season. Now I'm finally caught up, I've seen all the episodes. Can't wait till they start up again in April!

[crazy_bookworm]

estar: Really? Must have missed it. Either that, or I hadn't watched it yet. I watched the first episode over Christmas at the recommendation of two of my aunts who thought I would like it. I liked it, and bought the season pass, but only got around to watching the second to thirteenth episodes this past week. Who's your favorite character and performance? Mine are Emma; and Kurt doing Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It). Kurt is so funny when he's dancing to it, and Emma is just simply amazing as a character.

I was so tired this morning. I woke up at 630 so I could take the bus to school so I could get there by 9. I sat down to start doing some work, looked at the time time, 815, and thought, Wow, I haven't been to school this early EVER. Not even in high school. Oh... Wait... I forgot about when I'm at the school by 730 to do an 8 am lab... Lol.

[estar9821]

My favorite performance is probably Defying Gravity, or True Colors. Single Ladies was really funny too though, I love when Kurt's dad comes in the room...And Kurt would also have to be my favorite character. He has an aura around him...he's just so confident.

[Tuttle]

In response to computers:
I would generally recommend ThinkPads for laptops. I had some issues with mine that came up because of it being an IBM laptop with Lenovo support in warranty, but other than that I've only known of good things. My sister currently has a Mac, but besides that and my current laptop, we've always gotten ThinkPads and mine was the only one which had any issues. They've also gone further on the trying to make them less prone to dying since that one of mine (which I got in 2005).

While I would never personally get a Mac, I would also support this. I know of them surviving a lot of abuse, and OS X is a nice OS. The only thing windows really has going for it is having more games available.

I'd personally not get a Mac because for me they're not worth the price. I am a linux user so OS X would not add anything for me, and what I care about is different than the average person - reliability is even more important to me than to most people, and I care less about the performance. But for others, I'd recommend it.

---
Garrett: *hug*. If you need someone who doesn't know your family to talk to about what its like to loose family members, am available as I think you'd guess, but I have a feeling that isn't what you'd need. I personally found that sudden hurts more at first, but goes down faster than long and drawn out, because you can focus on knowing that they lived a good life until the end.

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In response to snow:

I really don't like how this winter is going. We're not having snow last here, and I want snow. It's not winter without snow. These past four days we've had rain, except one night where we apparently got 8 inches of snow, but by 10:30 the next morning, we only had a little slush. This much rain in winter is /wrong/.

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Job searching is obnoxious. I've been trying to find something, even just an internship, and its incredibly difficult. I'm having the issue of not knowing where I need to be living next year (other than being able to reach here), until I find a job, but if we're looking around here we need to be looking now.

--
And what I have been wanting to say can be summarized by copying and pasting something.

Degree Awarded: Bachelor of Science
Degree Date: Feb 25, 2010

[kk]

Everyone who spoke of computers:

The Mac laptops didn't look worth it for the price (as said Tuttle), and I know people who have had problems with files and such.

I'd considered the ThinkPad, because I've heard good things about them, but my dad (whose company recently got purchased by HP) convinced me into getting an HP laptop, and was able to get me about a $150 discount, which was good. And it had a free upgrade to 4GB Memory, and 500GB Hard Drive, which is already double the old laptop.

Also, a laptop of the same model was at a local store, and I got the chance to poke it. (And test it, and scratch at it, and pull on it, and do just about everything but drop it.) It seemed pretty sturdy, but I guess I'll only know when I actually have a chance to use it fully. Another good thing seemed to be that the paint had a gloss coating over it, which while attracting fingerprints, does protect the paint. Almost all of the paint on the Dell had scratched off of the commonly handled areas, and it was really bugging me.

So, here's hoping that the HP will last longer than two and a half years...

Tracking the shipping for things is fun. Right now, the computer is marked as being "Delayed Beyond Our Control" in "Frankfurt, DE." Over the past few days, it's gone from Shanghai, to Paris, to Almaty (Kazakhstan?), and now to Frankfurt. I wonder where it'll be tomorrow!

Tuttle: I'll trade you the remaining snow and prediction of snowstorms here, if you send us the rain! I'm getting a bit sick of snow, and the igloo that my parents built in the backyard makes me feel like it's taunting me. (Oh, and "Yaay!" about the degree!)

[Lazy Leopard]

I've started doing amateur radio stuff, and I'm also looking for a small portable computer, preferably with one or two of those old-fashioned serial ports, and, because that's the way the software goes, I'll want to be running linux on it. However, I bought me a fairly epensive radio three weeks ago, and then my main webserver lost its Magic Smoke(tm) over the weekend, so my budget for computery stuff and radio stuff is stretched a bit past the limits.

On the radio side, as I'm not licensed yet I'm not allowed to transmit, but I've been doing some listening, and I've been able to help some of the amateur high altitude balloon experiments by monitoring payloads. I've helped track a couple in the last fortnight. The first went and lost its GPS about five minutes in, so the tracking was rather imprecise, but it was eventually recovered in Holland. (The folks behind that launch have posted some pictures on Flickr.) The second was a bit more controlled and flew rather less far, but had two payloads, and had up-link as well as down-link communication. That, among other things, allowed its controllers to tell it when to let go and parachute back to earth.

I spent last Saturday in a class learning the basics about radio. The second half of this basic course is in two weeks' time, and ends with a short exam. I've not taken an exam for ages...

...and as for weather, we seem to be past the snow, but we've been getting rather a lot of rain. Yesterday I had a lake in my garden. Luckily it didn't get quite deep enough to flood my garage, but it came close. This morning it's chilly and sunny, though.

[EricG1793]

Garrett, best wishes to you and your family with recovery.

kk, I have an HP Pavilion DV2000Z that I got in January 2007. Besides a dead motherboard causing me to lose display (replaced under warranty), a few minor Windows Vista compatibility issues, and replacing the power plug (which I understand is a common issue for laptops, when the wires wear down and they start crackling), it's been smooth sailing. My glossy-coat paint still looks brand new, even though I move it around the house every day and travel with it almost every weekend.

My sister has an old (Windows 97) ThinkPad and that thing is extremely solid, yet lightweight for its age. From around the same time, we had an old ABS desktop that still runs today, and even years after the warranty expired, they were extremely helpful in helping me find driver information when I reformatted the hard drive.

As for HP Support... myeh. Could be better, but I always manage to get things done in the end. I had to send it in with the power cord problem, and I asked them to replace the left mouse button that the silver paint had worn off of, and they replaced the whole touch pad and hand rest plate. When I accidentally broke the keyboard, they replaced the whole thing and sent it back clean enough to pass a white-glove test.

[SilveredBlue]

As long as we're talking about computers....

I have a cute lil' Gateway NV 5331u, with Windows 7 (far superior to the Windows Vista on my mom's older lappie). I love it very much. It's really very nice, with a big screen and durable so far, even though I haul it all around like Eric does.

As for our home computer, 'm to lazy to go and look. I'll probably edit it in later.

SQUEE! I just realized AWoM is coming in only 6 or so weeks! *dances* I can't wait!!

[Wolf]

*spits chocolate milk over computer screen*

SIX WEEKS?!?!?!!?!??!?!!!!!!!!!

And. Okay. I already talked to kk about this, and I really think I'm gonna try to get the same computer (so when I have issues, I have an actual person to talk to!) but... since we're already on the topic, I might as well use it. What computers do you recommend? If it's your own computer, how long have you had it? Any issues? Whatever I get is gonna come with W7, so at least that's good. =P

[SilveredBlue]

Haha, you're funny, Wolf. Giant text!

but yes! I am so excited! I am also excited that March is here, even though I didn't realize it till today. (I can be really brain-dead about days of the month sometimes.) Okay, off to finish my schoolwork so that I can go to my friend's party!

[Trialia]

Oh, gods, really six weeks!? I must remember to have enough money in my account when Amazon try to take it out... so no more book-buying until AWoM, methinks. Ah well, goodness knows I've got a long enough to-read list!